Mirrors | Granta

  • Published: 02/09/2010
  • ISBN: 9781846272202
  • 128x20mm
  • 400 pages

Mirrors

Eduardo Galeano

Translated by Mark Fried

In Mirrors, Galeano smashes aside the narrative of conventional history and arranges the shards into a new pattern, to reveal the past in radically altered form. From the Garden of Eden to twenty-first-century cityscapes, we glimpse fragments in the lives of those who have been overlooked by traditional histories: the artists, the servants, the gods and the visionaries, the black slaves who built the White House, and the women who were bartered for dynastic ends

There is a mysterious power in Galeano's storytelling. He uses his craft to invade the privacy of the reader's mind, to persuade him or her to read and to continue reading to the very end, to surrender to the charm of his writing and the power of his idealism

Isabel Allende

To publish Eduardo Galeano is to publish the enemy: the enemy of lies, indifference, above all of forgetfulness. His tenderness is devastating, his truthfulness furious

John Berger

Brightly coloured commonplace book of a kind that was once popular in our culture but has now almost disappeared ... The beauty of Galeano's book lies not just in the eclectic choice of stories he tells, but more especially in his elegant, pared-down prose, sensitively translated by Mark Fried, with never an unnecessary word, nor one out of place ... Galeano's book is pure delight - a cornucopia of wonderful stories. It should be by everyone's bedside - and in every Christmas stocking

Richard Gott, Guardian

The Author

Eduardo Galeano’s works, which have been translated into 28 languages, include Memory of Fire; Soccer in Sun and Shadow; Days and Nights of Love and War; The Book of Embraces; Open Veins; and Voices of Time. Born in Montevideo, he fled in 1973 after the military coup’s leaders imprisoned him, and lived in exile first in Argentina until death threats there forced him onward to Spain, until returning to Uruguay in 1985 upon the collapse of the military dictatorship. He has lived there since, active in journalism, television and politics. He was awarded the first Lannan Prize for Cultural Freedom.

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